“As you can imagine, it is hard to study what happens in the brain during orgasm. From the little information we have, the ventral striatum is active in men and in women. That activity is to be expected, since so many studies link the nucleus accumbens, a major subcomponent of the ventral striatum, to pleasure. Interestingly, activity in many parts of the brain decreases during orgasm. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, the parahippocampal gyrus, and the poles of the temporal lobes decrease their activity. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is engaged when we think about ourselves and about our fears. The anterior cingulate is engaged when we monitor mistakes. The ends of the temporal lobes organize our knowledge of the world, and as we saw in the discussion of landscapes, the parahippocampus represents our external environment. What could a drop in neural activity in these areas mean? Perhaps it means that the person is in a state without fear and without thought of themselves or their future plans. They are not thinking about anything in particular and are in a state in which the very boundaries that separate them from their environment have disappeared. This pattern of deactivation could be the brain state of a purely transcendent experience enveloping a core experience of pleasure.”

“Howard S. Friedman, PhD, and author of “The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life,” decided to look into research conducted on couples. He cited a marital satisfaction study conducted by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman in 1941, looking at the sex lives of 1,500 Californian couples. Terman recorded the frequency of orgasms these women had. Twenty years later, Friedman and his colleagues studied the death certificates of each of the women in Terman’s study. What they discovered was that the women who reported a frequency of orgasm during intercourse tended to live longer than those who reported being less sexually fulfilled.”

“Research involving 600 college students led by Justin R. Garcia, an evolutionary biologist at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, and researchers at Binghamton University found that women were twice as likely to reach orgasm from intercourse or oral sex in serious relationships as in hookups. The paper was presented at the annual meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research and at the Annual Convention for Psychological Science this year. […]

[L]ack of guidance is common, Dr. England said. “Women are not feeling very free in these casual contexts to say what they want and need,” she said.”

“With another coy sidelong glance, she took two of my fingers in her mouth and played with them with her tongue and teeth. I gave her no warning and impulsively shoved two of my fingers inside her. She gave a small cry and bit down hard on my fingers. “That’s it, baby,” I said, “take it.” I coaxed her all the way back on the couch and lifted one of my legs over both of hers, straddling her. Now I was thankful that I’d worn jeans and not a confining skirt. I removed my sore fingers from her mouth and replaced them with my own mouth. We kissed deeply as I fucked her deep and hard. I shifted to allow her to spread her legs wider for me. Her breasts pressed and rubbed against my own, both our nipples hard and seemingly magnetically connected through the fabrics of our tops. When I could feel her tensing up, close to climaxing, I licked her earlobe and said softly, […] “Come for me, sweetheart.” As I said it, her body convulsed, and I could feel her constricting inside as a flood of her juices poured out over my hand. “That’s good.” Her head dropped back, and her breath came in gasps. I removed my hand and sucked on my fingers.”

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Carolyn Yates is the NSFW Editor for Autostraddle.com. She is also a freelance copy editor and writer, and her work has appeared in Bitch, The Toast, Xtra!, Jezebel, and other places. Find her on twitter.

Re: hookups and orgasms…Is there a chance that, maybe in a small percentage of cases, a woman who ordinarily articulates her desires quite well might find it hard to orgasm with a hook-up because orgasms can be hugely intense, vulnerable, emotional experiences that result in unexplained tears and a desire to curl into a ball? Asking for a friend.

I suspect I can actually only come if I feel totally certain that both me and the other chick are STD free. … I’ve yet to have a hook-up where that’s happened. Either she hasn’t gotten tested recently or I haven’t or she doesn’t believe that lesbians are capable of contracting venereal diseases (seriously – this is a thing a lot of people seem to think!?). Also, everyone is freaked out by dental dams.

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